Stepping back from the abyss

James Rebanks is the author of the newly-released book Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, which recently won the 2021 Wainwright prize for UK Nature writing, and best-seller The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. His books explore the experience of being a farmer from a millennia-old farming tradition that was almost lost to "improvement." Wonderfully written and highly readable, these accounts of his life in the Lake District of Cumbria, England, give us a lived sense of the promise of industrialism, the genuine short-term gains, the nuances of what went wrong and why...and the reality that there are no clear heroes and villains, but rather it's a truly complex system that has to be managed for land and human health if we want to survive.